[XHTML 2] 13.1 Hypertext Attributes Module - nextfocus

Dear HTML Working Group,

When a URI includes a fragment reference, it says that the element must be 
focused and that navigation starts at that element.

Please clarify what "when the document is first loaded" means, in this 
context, does it mean the element should be focused immediately upon the 
user agent parsing that element, or does it mean when the DOMLoad event 
fires it should be focused or somthing else?  Please clarify the wording, 
please also clarify the fact that the conformance requirement only applies 
to visual and other user agents, and not to search engine robots, validators 
and similar.

My concerns are that for non-visual user agents starting in the middle of a 
paragraph may be far from optimal, and we should not make a user agent 
non-conformant because it say decides to focus on the parent block element 
rather than the ID target.

Equally I another concern is that by focusing form elements onload we have 
the problem whereby pages which are slowly loading the user has already 
interacted with cause problems.  This is a common accessibility problem 
today, that people use javascript to change the focus onload of a document 
and it leads to problems where by people have already entered content into 
form fields.

Regards,

Jim Ley

Received on Saturday, 28 May 2005 12:50:53 UTC